Destructive Chaos from the Unknown

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, men of substantial power journey into the midst of the unknown in order to pursue some ultimate objective. Both men are iron-willed idealists, yet both men know nothing of what awaits them on their quest and therefore unsuspectingly walk straight into the destruction of what they sought to attain. In their expeditions within the unknown, the two men create their own chaos that leads to the failure of all for which their journeys stood.
Mr. Kurtz entered the wilderness of the Belgian Congo with tremendous moral and spiritual ideals, yet on his quest to save the savages he was consumed by the perceived darkness of a strange land and an unfamiliar culture. Kurtz began his moral escapade solely with the grand idea of civilizing and saving an unknown people. The idealist was completely unprepared for the customs of the native people and was therefore easily took the god-like status that was given to him. Kurtz proceeded to use his god powers to enhance the decay of his once-elevated virtues; he thereby created his own chaos that led him to abandon his ideals and cry for the extermination of all ‘the brutes.’ The trader’s great cause therefore failed within the self-inflicted chaos of Kurtz’s quest.
Similarly, Colonel Joll embarked on a campaign of political and military might to purge a perceived barbarian threat, yet in the process of supposedly defending the empire’s frontier he destroys the Magistrate’s frontier town. Joll knows virtually nothing about the barbarians, for he understands neither their culture nor the land in which they live; his actions on the frontier are based completely on the contrived notion of a barbarian threat. While such a threat does not at first exist, Joll induces barbarian backlash upon the frontier settlement (destruction of the wheat crop by flooding) and even creates a situation in which fear and the ends to which it takes the village destroy a frontier that Joll was charged with defending. Chaos consumes the town as the villagers allow the Colonel, in the name of defense, to suspend rule by law, to begin a campaign of brutality against the barbarians, and to release a wild army of uncontrollable soldiers to essentially rape, plunder, and pillage the settlement. By this chaos Joll’s mission failed.
We journey through the unknown each and every day of our lives, and within that unknown we create our own chaos that confuses, confounds, and even destroys the goals that we pursue. Our original intentions, whether they be positive, as in the case of Kurtz, or negative, as in the case of Joll, are insignificant because, just as happened to these two men, the chaos with which we struggle radically compromises our quests. “The best laid plans of mice and men” often do go terribly wrong within the unknown-induced chaos of our lives. (483)